Cold Compassion

Compassion is not a feeling or an emotion. To feel sorry for someone, or to feel sympathy is not compassion. I felt sorry for every person I killed. I thought that meant I was a compassionate person. I was wrong.

Compassion is the will to act out of understanding. Feeling sorry for someone often actually prevents us from being compassionate. Compassion understands emotional anguish, but it does not cater to it. True compassion is as emotionally cold as a natural predator. In fact, a true predator is driven by compassion, not lust, or wrath, or any other emotion. No rapist is ever really a true predator.

But, cold compassion is not unloving or inhuman. True compassion rises above feeble human feelings and raises us into the realm of eternal life. In truth, real compassion can only come from the eternal sense of reality, which is a world that surrounds us in space and time though we are unaware of it until our self deception (and illusion of space and time) wanes.

The emotions that we commonly call compassion (such as sympathy) lead us to do more harm than good when we turn to them for a sense of purpose. In and of themselves, these feelings are benign, and clearly even necessary. Like hunger, sympathy serves an important role toward our physical well-being. But also like hunger, sympathy can become a dangerous addiction that compels us to overfeed our egos the way hunger, when not checked, compels us to overfeed our bodies.

If you doubt what I am saying here, then you effectively doubt the wisdom and compassion of the Universe (i.e. “God”), which sadly, most people do; even professing Christians, Muslims and Jews. Consider the child that is born only to suffer a few years of poverty, disease and starvation, then dies for lack of just a few dollars worth of food and medicine. Now, consider this child living over a thousand years ago, so the lack of food and medicine is “natural”, and not any man's fault.

Is the Universe without compassion? If you say yes, then you do not yet understand what compassion is, and nor can you realize the true meaning of salvation. Salvation is the realization of true compassion.